


Assessment Day

by bearonthecouch



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alchemy, Annual Assessment, Flame Alchemy, Friendship, Gen, Post-Ishval War, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-02 13:58:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17265440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bearonthecouch/pseuds/bearonthecouch
Summary: Remember when you wanted what you currently have?





	Assessment Day

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to be somewhat scientifically accurate in this one, but it's been a long time since 10th grade chemistry. Please forgive me and just go with it.

Roy calls Maes. He doesn’t even say a word before his best friend lets out a little puff of air. Roy knows him well enough to picture the accompanying smirk.  
  
“Stop sulking, Roy,” Maes says. “You’ll be out here in less than a week. We can hit all the old haunts. Get up to old trouble.”  
  
Roy does smile at that, although he knows that Maes will never let him get anywhere near as drunk as they had when they were at the academy together. After Ishval, he’d nearly drowned in the bottle. Probably would’ve, if not for Hughes reminding him of the long-term goal he’d set for both himself and all of Amestris, and Hawkeye doing exactly what he’d asked her to and following him to East City to watch his back.  
  
Hawkeye is, indirectly, the reason for this call. Roy twists the phone cord around his finger, and tries to figure out how to word his concerns.  
  
“I’m not going to Central for a vacation,” he stresses to Hughes.  
  
“Yeah, yeah. The big scary State Alchemist test. You’ve never been worried before.”  
  
“I’d never made a promise to not let anyone else learn flame alchemy before.”  
  
“Ah. That’s what you’re worried about.”  
  
Roy exhales, a quiet sigh. The phone cord loops tighter around his finger, twist and untwist. “Alchemy is science, Hughes. Science is testable and repeatable. I can’t just show them a fireworks display without the research to back it up.”  
  
“And any research produced by a State Alchemist by definition belongs to the military,” Hughes says softly. He sympathizes with his friend, he really does.  
  
Maes can’t claim to fully understand the relationship between Roy Mustang and Riza Hawkeye, but he is aware, in a not-close-enough-to-know-all-the-details way, that Riza forced Roy to burn her half to death in a desperate attempt to wipe away all knowledge of the complex formulas that make lighting a fire as simple as rubbing a couple of fingers together.  
  
But as long as Roy possesses that knowledge, the military does too. They can use him - _have_ used him - as a human weapon. And they can work backward from the information they already have in order to recreate his methods. It’s only a matter of time. Time and talent… but if Mustang worked it out before he turned twenty-one, surely some other alchemist with years of experience can look at his array, which isn’t exactly hidden, and combine it with the research he did before and during the Ishval War. Roy's work is coded and classified, but that doesn't mean it's safe. .  
  
“Maes,” Roy says, after both of them have been silent for nearly a full minute.  
  
“Why don’t you come to Central a day or two early?” Hughes suggests, because he's always been fairly good at distracting Roy from his problems, and his guilt.  
  
“Government won’t pay for my ticket.”  
  
“I will.”  
  
“You make less than I do. And you’ve got a wife.”  
  
Roy can practically hear Maes smiling at the mention of Gracia. “She’s an amazing cook, Roy! I mean, you know. You’ve had some of her cookies.” In the care packages that very occasionally showed up during the war. But neither of them mention that. “But she’ll make you whatever you want. She’s trying this new quiche thing, I swear, it’s heaven.”  
  
“You hate eggs.”  
  
“I hate _military_ eggs. Gracia’s eggs are an entirely different thing.”  
  
“What makes you think I’m staying with you?”  
  
“You wound me.”  
  
“My aunt might kidnap me.”  
  
“Actually, I believe that.”  
  
Maes sighs, as Roy’s stretch of silence continues. If they were together, Maes could coax him into talking with a touch. But as it stands, all he can do is hum softly into the receiver and listen as Roy wrestles with his conscience on the other end of the line.  
  
“You said a fire can't start without a spark,” Hughes prompts.  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“So just don't tell them how to start a spark. Then you're still keeping your promise.”  
  
Roy sighs heavily. “Ignition cloth isn't a secret, Hughes.”  
  
“But you're the only one who can… hell, Roy, I don't even know how to describe what you do. Lighting a spark is one thing, but you… you set the world on fire.”  
  
More silence from Roy’s side of the phone.  
  
“Why don't you talk to Riza about this?”  
  
If they were in the same room, Maes would see Roy rolling his eyes. The man gives no verbal answer, but Hughes doesn't really need one. He's seen Riza Hawkeye when she’s angry, and it’s downright terrifying, and somehow always worse when Roy’s involved.  
  
“You’ll figure it out,” he insists, the same way he always had back at the academy when Roy was stressing over an upcoming exam.  
  
But this isn’t that simple and they both know it. Still, Roy sighs. “I guess I’m gonna have to,” he mutters into the phone.  
  
“That’s the spirit.”

* * * *

Roy sits at his desk, feeling useless as Second Lieutenant Hawkeye moves piles of paperwork with brisk efficiency, occasionally handing a page over to him so he can sign it. By the time she's done this five or six times, he at least gathers the courage to clear his throat. Then, he puts his hand down on the stack of paper she's reaching for. Her hand almost – almost – brushes his, but doesn't.  
  
He glances up, meeting her eyes.  
  
“Sir?” Riza asks steadily. She pulls her hand away from his and sets it down on the edge of the desk.  
  
Roy settles back in his chair, wishing he didn't feel so much like a child caught doing something wrong.  
  
“My train leaves this afternoon,” he reminds her, pointlessly.  
  
She nods. “Of course, sir. Don't worry. We'll get on fine without you.”  
  
He smiles, imagining the trouble his team is capable of getting into. But he's well aware that Hawkeye is the one they really listen to. They trust him, and they'll fight for him, but when it comes to the simple day-to-day tasks of the office, it's the lieutenant who gives the orders. Havoc gripes about it, because they're the same rank and he still remembers her from their days at the Eastern Region's military school in New Optain, when she – not only a girl, but a _freshman_ girl – knocked him down from spot one in the marksmanship rankings. Breda just shrugs and points out that any sane person would listen to Hawkeye over Havoc. And they all get their work done.  
  
“I trust you,” Roy says quietly, and Hawkeye's eyes widen. There is so much loaded into that sentence that she doesn't even know where to start. But she nods, and pretends he's only talking about leaving her in charge of the team while he's gone. “Do you trust me?” he asks, even more quietly.  
  
The very same words he'd asked years ago, when they'd stood in front of her father's grave. Now, as then, she nods, still wondering what he's getting at.  
  
Roy rubs the back of his neck, the way he does when he's tired or nervous, and Riza frowns. “You're really this worried?” she says.  
  
He nods, puts his hands down flat on the desk and pushing down, as if that can somehow support him. His eyes flicker up to hers, though, at least until he closes them and takes a breath and wonders: _What can they make me do that's worse than what I've already done?  
  
_It's not that Riza doesn't know how the State Alchemist program works, that he constantly has to try new things and push the science forward. And flame alchemy is such a new field that it isn't hard to find new questions within it that need to be answered. Ishval bought him time, at least as far as annual assessment was concerned: active deployment precludes a trip back to Central to stand in front of a committee and show off. That doesn't mean his superiors weren't watching him. That doesn't mean he wasn't learning. Fieldwork's better – more useful – than theory, any day. That's why they have a practical exam.  
  
He refined a lot of theory in the desert sands: accuracy, distance targeting, temperature control, timing - both starting and stopping fires. The military's libraries and records rooms probably contain whole books full of the knowledge he gained in the murder and torture of thousands – maybe tens of thousands - of innocent people.  
  
It's not like those reports contain anything like a step-by-step instruction manual. Maes is still right when he says that nobody else can do what he can do. But he's terrified to confront the idea that burning out Berthold's coded equations from Riza's flesh might still not be enough to guarantee the promise; that he might have tortured _her_ , all for nothing. She asked, she wanted the responsibility ripped away from her body, and Roy is just as happy to take the burden from her now as he was half a decade ago, before either of them realized the full consequence or cost of her father's legacy.  
  
Whatever happens, from the moment Roy first pulled on a pyrotex glove, is his fault, and his fault only. Riza's got nothing to do with it.  
  
But her worried brown eyes meet his darker ones, and Roy just sighs.  
  
He longs so desperately to reach out for her comfort. Her hands on his body had steadied him, through the war. Her lips on his had breathed in life.  
  
It's not that he's afraid he'll fail the recertification assessment; that's so unlikely it nearly borders on impossible, given his status and notoriety and how desperate the government is to hold onto any passingly competent alchemist, these days. The thing is, he's not certain he wants to pass. He knows what people call them: the State Alchemists who were supposed to use their unparalleled knowledge to serve the common good are now nothing more than the military's dogs. And he's the worst one. For every person that believes the hype and calls him a hero, there are many more who look at him with hard anger or cold fear.  
  
“Do you think I should've quit?” he asks Riza.  
  
More than half of the State Alchemists who survived the war resigned. That's why the Fuhrer's got Roy combing nowhere towns all over the country hunting down just _rumors_ of talented civilian alchemists. He's been doing it for over a year, and the closest he's come to a solid lead is a half-dead eleven-year-old whose existence he purposely glossed over in his written report.  
  
“You told me – you told _him_ – that Amestris needs alchemy to protect itself. To protect the people.”  
  
“Yeah,” Roy says softly. And that had gone so fucking _well_. Berthold had accused him of regurgitating government propaganda, and then choked to death on his own blood.  
  
“Do you still believe it?” Riza asks. And he'd thought the war had ground her down, the same way it felt like it had shredded his soul. But the way she asks him – right now – he can hear the hope in her voice. She _wants_ him to say yes. She wants to believe him.  
  
He shrugs. “I dunno, Ri. I think I wish I could believe it.”  
  
She grabs for his hand, and given their negotiated absence of casual touch over the past year, the contact sends lightning shooting up his arm and his heart skips a beat. Riza folds his fingers into a fist, and traces her thumb over the transmutation circle on his glove. He holds his breath as she does it. When he closes his eyes, he can see the symbols inked into her skin. _Salve Spiritus Ignus_.  
  
He doesn't realize he's audibly murmuring the phrase, the three Latin words he actually knows, until he hears Riza's sharp intake of breath, and he opens his eyes again.  
  
She's there waiting, serious but soft. His heart thrums under his ribcage. She lets go of his hand, and he breathes a little easier.  
  
_Salve Spiritus Ignus._  
  
“I trust you,” Riza says, loud and strong.  
  
* * * *  
  
Roy meets Maes on the Central Station platform. His best friend is smiling and whistling, hands in the pockets of his military uniform and looking entirely too cheerful. He wraps Roy into a bear hug the minute the alchemist steps off the train.  
  
“It's been too damn long, Roy.”  
  
“I know.” Roy pushes Maes off of him so that he doesn't suffocate, but he's still grinning.  
  
“You seem like you're in a better mood,” Hughes observes.  
  
“Yeah.” Roy stuffs his hands in his pockets and starts the familiar walk back toward Central Command. “I talked to Riza.”  
  
Maes smiles as he follows his friend. “That's good, I guess. Although, if you quit the military, you could come live in Central again. Gracia could probably find you a job at the coffee shop.”  
  
Roy raises an eyebrow.  
  
“You could work at your aunt's bar?”  
  
Roy stops walking completely and turns to look at Hughes. “ _Really?_ ”  
  
“I meant the serving alcohol part, Roy, come on!”  
  
Roy rolls his eyes. “I'm not quitting the military.”  
  
“Oh. Good.” They walk together in silence for a while, and then: “Is it weird for you, staying with me and Gracia?”  
  
“No,” Roy says, after too long of a pause.  
  
“It's probably weird for Gracia, too,” Hughes admits, as he clears his throat awkwardly and doesn't look at Roy. “She'll never say so.”  
  
“It's fine, Maes, I can find a hotel, or-”  
  
“At least come to dinner.”  
  
They meet each other's eyes, as they stand slightly out of the way of the major flow of traffic on the Central City sidewalk, clinging tightly to this compromise, this single fragile thread that still holds them together.  
  
Roy nods, and plasters a smile on his face. “Sure. I'll come to dinner.”  
  
And dinner turns into drinks turns into the awkward moment when Hughes has to leave Roy alone on the living room couch so that he can go be with his wife. But at that point, it's so late-early that it isn't worth it for Roy to try to find anywhere else to spend the remaining few hours before he has to go prove himself to the military. He rolls onto his side and curls up tucked against the corner where the arm of the couch meets the back, until the soft sunlight wakes him and he scrubs his hands over his face and blinks bleary eyes as he sits up.  
  
“Rise and shine,” Hughes chirps, from a few feet away, where he stands next to the counter dividing the living room from the kitchen, a mug of still-steaming coffee in his hand. Ever the morning person. Roy groans, but he staggers to his feet when Maes offers him a mug of his own, and then he washes up in the bathroom and pulls a clean uniform out of his suitcase. Just before he pulls open the front door, Maes squeezes his shoulder and whispers a “Good luck,” in his ear. Roy nods, and tries to pretend he isn't nervous.  
  
The Fuhrer was there when he passed the State Alchemist Exam the first time. Roy'd seen the glint in the man's eye the moment he snapped fire into being from the invisible manipulation of the air, combined with the single spark lit by the friction between his fingers.  
  
This time it isn't so impressive as all that, but it's unsettling enough, when he's being judged by a reasonably large handful of Central's top brass, including Brigadier General Grand, one of the few State Alchemists who outranks him. Roy stands at perfect attention and salutes and concentrates on breathing, slow and deep. He won't let on that he hasn't let himself use his alchemy – not in any real way, beyond a few small candlelight flames as an experiment to confront his own fear – since the day he kept a promise that included the phrase “never again.”  
  
Nearly everyone here judging his research and skill spent at least a little bit of time in Ishval, and even the one or two who didn't know him by reputation. “At ease,” Grand says reluctantly, and Roy settles into a slightly more relaxed stance. There are men here who are higher up in the command structure – by a _lot –_ than Basque Grand, but they seem to be letting him take the lead. Because he's an alchemist? Probably. Roy lets his eyes rove over the panel of soldiers and alchemists and researchers and wonders what they're looking for. What version of him do they want to see? The scientist, or the killer?  
  
He flexes his hand, covered by the glove that somewhere along the line started to feel just as familiar as his own skin. His fist opens and closes, and he takes a deep breath. At his observers' subtle cue, he reaches out and snaps his fingers. Flames flare up in a circle around him, following the track of concentrated oxygen he invisibly controls, just far enough away that he can't touch it. The heat is oppressive and sets his heart pounding. Nothing's on fire except the air itself. There isn't any smoke. But still, the fear is choking. He puts out the fire as quickly as he'd started it, pulling the oxygen out of the air, replacing it with carbon dioxide to douse the flames.  
  
But that's not enough. These people already know what he can do. He has to prove that he can do something _more_ , that he can stretch for new applications of something that was considered impossible just five years ago.  
  
On a whim, Roy grabs a glass of water from the table and spills it out onto the floor. Before the generals can finish their shocked protests, he's pressing his hand with its transmutation circle down into the puddle, breaking apart the water into its component hydrogen and oxygen. It's a game he played when he was fourteen and fifteen years old; it's easy. But unlike when he was a teenager, now, he can snap a spark into being. He does it with his still-dry left hand. And that spark, combined with those volatile elements, explodes into bright fire.  
  
The wash of heat and flame is violent and dangerous, and it roars around him as his heartbeat tattoos rapidly inside his chest. His breathing grows shallow, and familiar panic threatens to overtake him. _No_. He cannot – _will not_ – lose control of this fire. His world narrows down to little more than calculations and ratios, chemical compositions, at rest and in motion, that he's been learning and memorizing and using since he was twelve. People think he controls flames, but he doesn't, not really. He manipulates air. He manipulates _water_. And the explosion he just created leaves behind a pool of water as well as fire.  
  
Roy manipulates the air, and the fire, and the water, breaking it down into its component pieces, balancing equations with both mental and physical manipulation. Fire needs fuel as well as oxygen to burn, and he can suck both away. He does it carefully, so that even if he's feeling a little light-headed, he's not transmuting his own breathable air out of existence. And soon enough, there's only the aftermath of his experiment, a puddle of simple liquid water that settles around his boots. He glances up at the superior officers sitting behind their table, deciding his future. He sees their sideways glances, and he can't help but smirk a little, buoyed by old confidence, a little bit of the cocky boy he used to be.  
  
“Not so useless with water after all, are you, Flame?” the Iron Blood Alchemist observes. It might be a compliment. Roy isn't entirely sure. Grand has indicated a certain kind of grudging respect for him ever since the medal ceremony when they both earned their war commendations and got promoted. Roy knows damn well that doesn't mean the man trusts him, but that lack of trust goes both ways. He's just glad the new brigadier general isn't his commanding officer anymore.  
  
“It's something I've been working on,” Roy admits. “Something I wanted to try. Needs refinement, obviously, but...” He shrugs. “Yeah. I'm not so useless.”  
  
He holds the general's gaze, and he isn't scared anymore. He isn't afraid of himself or of what he can do, and he isn't scared that anyone else is going to take it away from him either. He can – he _has –_ scribbled down the chemical equations that define what he just did, but that by itself doesn't make the process repeatable. It's a big jump from 2H2 \+ O2 → 2H2O to being actually able to transmute something as difficult to see and measure as the composition of air, or the molecules of water. Calculations – exact quantities – are critically important in all alchemy, and Roy made a lot of dangerous mistakes before he got to the point where he could make those calculations under life-threatening stress.  
  
Roy can think of maybe two people who might have the skill to master flame alchemy, and neither of them are State Alchemists anymore. And none of them are sitting in this room.  
  
He sticks his hand into his pocket, feeling the comfortable weight of the pocketwatch resting there, and all that's left is signing paperwork and agreeing to register his publishable research, if any, at the First Branch Library.  
  
“Congratulations, Lieutenant Colonel Mustang,” says Roy's chemistry teacher from the academy. The man is smiling, clearly impressed. Roy knows his abilities have plenty more to do with Berthold Hawkeye and his daughter than with anything he learned in Major Warren's textbook-based lab assignments, but he accepts the compliment with a small smile and a slight nod.  
  
Because the truth is, he's been a State Alchemist for years, but this is the first time in a long time that he's _wanted_ to be one.

* * * *  
  
“So you passed, eh?” Hughes asks. The major is leaning against the wall across the hall from the door Roy's just exited, looking far too casual.   
  
Mustang rolls his eyes. “This isn't the academy, Hughes. You don't have to wait outside the exam room for me to be finished.”  
  
“You look happier than you ever did at the academy, though.”  
  
“Because I'm actually _good_ at alchemy. Are you hungry?” Now that Roy's finished his assessment, he's got nothing else he has to do but kill time in Central until his evening train.  
  
Maes doesn't directly answer the question, but he follows Roy to a small casual restaurant a few blocks from HQ, where they talk between bites of huge sandwiches and piles of perfectly salted fries.  
  
“So you're not actually submitting your research, are you?” Maes asks.  
  
Roy shrugs. “I'll see if they notice.”  
  
“And if they do?”  
  
“I'm notoriously bad at submitting paperwork on time, and I sincerely apologize.”  
  
Maes grins. “I knew you'd figure it out.”  
  
Roy smiles back, and rubs the fingers of his ungloved hand together before he stuffs his fist into his pocket, fingers curled around his watch.  
  
* * * *

He sleeps with his head resting against the cool window on the overnight train ride, and Riza's smile as she hands him his coffee in the office the next morning makes everything worth it. “Still trust me?” he murmurs, as he sips the warm liquid.  
  
“Always.”

 


End file.
